Dr. Peter Appelbaum, professor and director of disciplinary and transdisciplinary programs in the Department of Curriculum, Cultures, and Child/Youth Studies, was invited to participate in several special sessions at this year’s Curriculum Studies conference, October 17-20. He presented on post-human conceptions of “knowledge” in the opening “Spotlight” session on a “Post-Human Manifesto for Curriculum Studies,” on “An Articulate Puppet Doing an Excellent Job of Pretending to be an Automaton,” as part of the “Featured Spotlight Session” on “Slovoj Žižek and Education,”and on “The Double Stories of an Aesthetic Way of Life,” as part of the “Spotlight Session” on “Curriculum and the Aesthetic Way of Life.”

Members of the community interested in joining the post-human collaborative for educational theory should contact Appelbaum at appelbap@arcadia.edu. Appelbaum’s presentation on Žižek was based on a chapter in press for the first book to be published on the theories of Žižek applied to education. Appelbaum also performed Vincent Persichetti’s Parable for Solo Horn, accompanied by a prezi presentation, “A Parable for Our Times,” provoking dialogue on the impossibility of words to communicate the current politics of education in Pennsylvania and in particular in Philadelphia schools.